Like, For Sure, Totally

Nicholas Cage is something of a meme at this point. The actor, a member of the Coppola family and who once won an Academy Award for his performance in Leaving Las Vegas, is more known at this point for his over-the-top performance style and penchant for wild-eyed characters. When you think of Nicholas Cage you don’t tend to think of his more “normal” roles, such as Ronny Cammareri in Moonstruck, Jack Singer in Honeymoon in Vegas, or Roy Waller in Matchstick Men. No, you likely flash to his performances where he screams, bugs out his eyes, and acts really weird such as when he played Castor Troy in the brilliantly stupid Face/Off, or Edward Malus in the just plain stupid The Wicker Man remake.

I was thinking of this after watching Longlegs. That’s a really strange movie with a particularly strange co-starring performance from Cage. Watching that film, I had to wonder how we got where we got with Cage, if performances like this were always in him. And, as it turned out, Amazon Prime was clearly thinking the same thing because, once I popped the Longlegs DVD out of my player and started browsing online, Cage’s first lead performance showed up in my feed: Valley Girls, the 1983 romantic teen sex comedy where he plays the “punk”, Randy.

I’ll be clear up front: I’ve seen Valley Girl twice now and I was unimpressed with the film both times. I know the movie was fairly successful when it came out (making $17 Mil at the Box office against its $3 Mil budget), and it helped launch the careers of not only Nick Cage but also co-star Deborah Foreman. It has its fans, including Kevin SmithConsidering where he came from, working as a clerk in a convenience store, it's pretty impressive that (for at least a little while) Kevin Smith became a defining cinematic voice of a generation. (who calls it one of his favorite movies ever), and was even popular enough to warrant a jukebox musical remake in 2020 (although COVID helped scuttle the wide release of that film, condemning it to video-on-demand). And yet, despite all that, the film just doesn’t click with me.

The movie focuses on two teens, Valley girl Julie (Foreman) and Hollywood punk Randy (Cage). Julie, rich and popular at her highschool, has grown bored of her boyfriend, Tommy (Michael Bowen), and decides to break up with him, hoping she can play the field at an upcoming party and find someone new to date. Tommy, though, makes it clear that no one else should go near Julie, so she’s left alone at the party, much to her displeasure. That is until Randy and his friend, Fred (Cameron Dye), crash the party after overhearing about it at the beach. Randy and Julie lock eyes, and sudden chemistry changes everything.

For the next couple of months, Randy and Julie are inseparable, this despite the fact that she’s a valley girl and he’s a punk. They have the kind of instant connection no one else can understand, and then end up spending hours just hanging out, chatting, having a great time together. But Julie’s friends – Elizabeth Daily as Loryn, Heidi Holicker as Stacey, and Michelle Meyrink as Suzi – don’t approve of Randy and think Julie should be with someone more like her… like her ex-boyfriend Tommy. This leaves her conflicted because she wants to be with someone her friends approve of, but she doesn’t really like Tommy, not the way she likes Randy. What’s she supposed to do?

To be clear, there are parts of Valley Girl I do like. I think the middle act of the film, developing the relationship between Julie and Randy works really well. While their instant attraction is established early, and is fair (teens making eyes at each other and instantly making out is expected behavior), I appreciate that the film doesn’t instantly have them fall in love. It sets their dating along a slow montage, with them spending a lot of time together, getting to know each other. It allows their relationship to have a lived in feel between them (aided in no small part by the fact that the chemistry between the two leads was real since they started dating while making the film) that many other romantic comedies tend to rush.

The film also does at least try to differentiate and develop each of the leads as their own people coming from different worlds. While the film doesn’t really understand valley girls or punk culture (director Martha Coolidge stated as such) it does at least make an attempt to have Julie seem more “upscale” while Randy feels like slightly more of a “hood” by comparison. We are talking sanitized, rich, white kids so there’s only so much of a contrast the film can truly make, but at least it’s there.

As far as the Cage at the center of it all, he’s on the decidedly “normal” end of the spectrum, at least for Nick Cage. He’s playing a regular dude here, a fairly normal guy (at least for someone that’s also supposed to be a punk), and Cage plays him like a fairly average teen. There’s a little bit of his wild-eyed wonder, a couple of times where he does a little bit of over-the-top dancing, but this is probably one of the more sedate Cage performances, likely owing to it being one of his first on film (outside playing an unnamed friend in Fast Times at Ridgemont High). It’s not a bad performance, from him or even from Foreman (who is sweet enough, trying to sell Julie as more than a vapid valley girl).

With all that said, the film has a number of flaws that hold it back from being truly great in my book. First and foremost, almost no one in the film other than Julie and Randy have any development. Julie’s friends are all basically as flat as cardboard, with little to differentiate them besides what they wear and how they style their hair. This might have been an aesthetic choice on the part of the production but it does also leave us with three bland hangers-on that could have been condensed into one actually essential character instead. One friend makes out with Tommy, Julie’s ex soon after they break up, another struggles on a double date with Julie, Randy, and Fred, while the third has a subplot about liking a guy, but the guy possibly liking her mom instead. If all of this was condensed down and ironed out a bit it could make for an interesting, conflicted best friend character who has her own growth and arc, instead of three flat characters that don’t do much and have tiny plot pieces that fail to go anywhere.

The film also doesn’t really know how to build to a strong ending. Spoilers for a forty year old movie, but in the last act Julie breaks up with Randy because of peer pressure, and Randy (after wallowing in sadness for a bit) works with Fred to figure out how to get her back. After a bit of creepy stalking (which she finds cute because it was the 1980s and that’s how Hollywood thought about romance) eventually Randy shows up at the prom, punches Tommy, and this somehow wins Julie’s heart. The ending feels rushed, with more content being needed to show Julie regretting her decisions and coming around to Randy once again… but that kind of development is missing here.

The biggest sin of the film, though, is the simple fact that for a comedy Valley Girl isn’t that funny. I don’t remember laughing at the film once the whole time. I know it’s supposed to be a comedy because it’s certainly not dramatic enough otherwise. The drama is as slight as the comedy, with the two effervescent leads skimming along happily for most of the film. I think the humor is largely supposed to come from how the girls talk and how superficial they act, but forty years removed they don’t seem all that strange or weird. The girls in Clueless talk in a much more heightened style than anything on display in this film. Valley Girl is light and bubbly but not essential or interesting.

It’s not that I want to hate on this film. I’ve given Valley Girl two attempts, and both times I’ve finished the film going, “well, I guess that was a movie.” It is a bubbly little film and that might be why people like it. It can transport them back to when they were teens, letting them recapture a little of their youth. But for me the film feels slight and maybe even a little bland. I’d like more from it, in any direction, but that’s just not the kind of film we have with Valley Girl.